Truth-Seeking at Telluride ; Film Festival's Subjects Range from FDR to Marilyn to Shin Bet

Truth-Seeking at Telluride ; Film Festival's Subjects Range from FDR to Marilyn to Shin Bet

Article excerpt

This year at the festival subjects range from FDR to Marilyn to
Shin Bet.

A film festival held in a mountain setting on a holiday weekend
may not be the likeliest setting for philosophical speculation, but
for the past four days the Telluride Film Festival has offered
something like a seminar on the nature of truth. In an age of
reality television, journalistic fakery and political mendacity,
everyone knows that words and images can distort and mislead. And
film is a particularly unstable medium, alluring us with a promise
of honesty while it feeds us ever more elaborate fantasies.

So we could start our local inquiry with movies that, while
clearly fictional, have that elusive, bracing feeling of realness. A
movie like Jacques Audiard's tough and tender melodrama "Rust and
Bone," with its workaday French setting and its restless hand-held
camera. Or Noah Baumbach's "Frances Ha," a fleet-footed, black-and-
white New York story about a young woman in crisis (Greta Gerwig,
Mr. Baumbach's companion and co-writer) that turns self-
consciousness into an exalted form of authenticity. Or Michael
Haneke's "Amour," a work of impeccable formal control that captures,
remorselessly but also tenderly, the agony of a long-married couple
facing death.

Or else we might start with movies that are obviously about real
people and events and just as obviously works of entertaining make-
believe. In Roger Michell's "Hyde Park on Hudson," for example, the
role of Franklin D. Roosevelt is played by Bill Murray, who noted at
a post-screening Q. and A. session Saturday that he had previously
been asked only to portray presidents in comedy sketches, and that
Roosevelt was a very big historical deal. "He's on the dime," Mr.
Murray reminded the audience. "You know what a dime is, right?" he
asked Mr. Michell, who is British but who nonetheless seemed to have
some notion.

Speaking of dimes, "Hyde Park on Hudson" is perhaps a bit shiny
and thin, emphasizing Roosevelt's playful charm and his sexual
appetites rather than his political achievements. Taking place in
and around his mother's rural New York estate, the film explores his
relationship with Daisy Suckley (Laura Linney), a distant cousin of
Roosevelt's who was also his lover, during a visit in 1939 from the
king and queen of England (Samuel West and Olivia Colman). Those two
-- the characters, not the actors -- are the same stuttering Bertie
and supportive Elizabeth who popped up on Telluride screens two
years ago in "The King's Speech" and went on to win a bunch of
Academy Awards.

But we are philosophizing here, not buzzing about prizes. So we
will refrain from handicapping the Oscar chances of Ben Affleck's
"Argo," which arrived in Telluride as a semi-surprise sneak preview
and provided a jolt of swift and slick entertainment. We will note,
though, that Mr. Affleck's film, in which he plays a C.I.A.
operative trying to rescue Americans trapped in revolutionary Iran,
is very much rooted in actual events. Like "Hyde Park on Hudson" it
looks at a well-known story (in this case the 1979 seizure of the
American Embassy in Tehran) from a new angle.

Both movies take advantage of information that was made public
years after the fact and use the standard tools of period filmmaking
to reopen the past. The German film "Barbara" (winner of the top
prize in Berlin this year) and "No," from Chile, are more modest
with respect to production design but in other ways more ambitious
than their American counterparts, revisiting painful moments from
recent history and trying to drag suppressed or dissembled truths
into the light.

"Barbara," directed by Christian Petzold, is a quiet, tense drama
set in East Germany in 1980 and stars the remarkable Nina Hoss as a
doctor struggling to preserve a sense of autonomy and dignity in a
society predicated on lies, treachery and paranoia. …

A primary source is a work that is being studied, or that provides first-hand or direct evidence on a topic. Common types of primary sources include works of literature, historical documents, original philosophical writings, and religious texts.